MADRID (Reuters) -Puig, the Barcelona-based company behind perfume brands Rabanne, Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier, reported a 14.3% rise in fourth-quarter sales on Thursday, beating analyst expectations for the key holiday period.
With 73% of its annual revenues from fragrance sales, the Spanish group relies heavily on the holiday season. Analysts estimate that nearly half of its prestige perfumes are sold in the quarter, which includes Black Friday and Christmas.
“Our core business has good momentum over the holiday season,” Puig Chairman and CEO Marc Puig said during an analyst call, adding that the outstanding performance of some fragrance brands helped offset lower results in make-up.
But overall, Puig saw more moderate sales growth during the Christmas period compared to the rest of the year.
Puig said in a statement its net sales for the three months to Dec. 31 were 1.36 billion euros ($1.42 billion), above the 1.30 billion euro average forecast from analysts polled by LSEG.
Sales in its core fragrance and fashion business grew by 21% in the holiday quarter, with Carolina Herrera Good Girl becoming the number one feminine fragrance in the U.S. market for the first time, the Puig CEO added.
Meanwhile, sales in Puig’s make-up division fell 7.2%, with its key Charlotte Tilbury brand affected by a voluntary withdrawal of select batches of Airbrush Flawless Setting Spray in December over what Puig described as “an isolated quality issue in a limited number of batches”.
Puig’s CEO said Charlotte Tilbury had begun reshipping the product to retailers.
The company, which also owns luxury skincare brand Byredo, said full-year sales reached 4.79 billion euros ($4.99 billion), up 11% from 2023, surpassing its goal of increasing sales faster than the 6%-7% forecast for the global premium beauty market.
The average of analyst estimates was for sales of 4.72 billion euros in 2024, given Puig is less exposed to sluggish demand in China and more than half of its revenue comes from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 36% from the Americas.
The 2024 performance of larger rivals such as Estee Lauder and L’Oreal was hampered by muted demand from China, where a property crisis and high youth unemployment have curbed consumer spending.
($1 = 0.9599 euros)
(Reporting by Corina Pons; Editing by David Latona, David Goodman and Alexander Smith)
